User blog:LeMansRacer/2016 and Year 10
2016 will mark this wiki's 10th year since the first edit was made, by none of the current editors that are around today. You've all worked hard to get this far, those that are still around and those that check back now and then, and it's certainly an achievement to be one of the more popular racing wikis on the wikia network. We ticked over 2,000 articles in 2014, and nearly 500 have been created since. There are over 30 games in the Need for Speed Series... and a film, so there's certainly more to cover. This wiki is in a unique position in having one of the biggest catalogue of games in a franchise to cover; that also happens to span at least 20 years, and be one of the top ten best selling game franchises of all time. This wiki has seen some dramatic changes in the games it covers, and the community that enjoys those games. Popular articles have also shifted, for the past four years the BMW M3 GTR (Race) has been the most popular article on the site, and with good reason, but in the past year however that has shifted to games themselves taking centre stage alongside the cars featured in the most recent titles. In 1994, The Need for Speed was published by Electronic Arts following development by Pioneer Productions, a team within EA Canada, in collaboration with Road and Track magazine. Subsequent games were developed by EA Canada and EA Seattle, until 2002, when a small developer called Black Box Games was bought by Electronic Arts, and became a subsidiary of EA Canada. Black Box's first solo Need for Speed game was a reboot of the series released in 2003. Their take on the series introduced the tuner culture to long time fans of Need for Speed, and ditched the previous hallmarks of the series from police to supercars. The spin-off proved popular with fans and cemented the studio with their take on the series from 2003 to 2011. In 2010, Criterion Games released their first title in the series - Hot Pursuit. Criterion Games has long been fans of the Need for Speed series, going as far as saying the original Burnout, released in 2001, was crafted from their fandom of The Need for Speed released for the 3DO. This lead to Burnout 3: Takedown, one of EA's highest metacritic rated racing games released for sixth generation consoles, and Burnout Paradise side-by-side with Hot Pursuit, as EA's highest metacritic rated racing games released for seventh generation consoles. Opinion We won't know what 2016 will bring, but I certainly hope it brings one of those high rating racing games Criterion is known for. The Criterion of old may be split up nowadays between Playground Games, Ghost Games, Three Fields Entertainment, and who knows how many other studios; but Ghost Games could still work their magic with 2015's Need for Speed, maybe saving their A-game for 2016. While this year's Need for Speed may be borrowing some design elements from Forza Horizon - which in turn is borrowing those elements from Bizzare Creation's Project Gotham Racing, but Playground Games is made up of a fair few of them - that doesn't mean we're seeing the full picture. The first year, of what could be the new way to play Need for Speed, is certainly interesting, if not bare bones enough to provide a stable platform to build upon. If content has been left out for a bigger push next year, it's certainly been done for a reason. It doesn't matter if what people have seen isn't in the game. Game development is a difficult process and has become more difficult as the demand for quality has grown. What may have worked in pre-alpha, alpha or even as late as beta could have been cut following its completion; some things just don't work and it takes a near complete product to see it. If it turns up later, it's because it needed that time for polish to be a good piece of content today, and not a sucky piece of content today. Some members of the development team will have worked on 2015's Need for Speed for nearly three years, if not longer, and that's a long time to work on something. In the time Underground 2, Most Wanted, and Carbon was released a Need for Speed was developed, think about how much has happened in your life in that time, and then add a stressful job on top of that. What I'm trying to say is that some parts of the community really suck, and this isn't exclusive to the Need for Speed community as it's across a lot of games. These people don't need negativity from the fans they poured three years of their life into pleasing with a £40 piece of escapism. Negativity doesn't get anywhere. Be positive, embrace the people that worked hard to create that fun racing game for you; good vibes resonate. Need for Speed's demographic is 16 to 26 years of age and around 40% are female, so let's all try and be the grown up fans they think we are. *Is customisation lacking? No, there's a full system their to alter car parts and that can be expanded upon. *Why aren't their parts for Ferrari cars? Go ask Ferrari, they'll be the ones saying no to Ghost letting people alter their "perfect" cars. *Why isn't may favourite car in the game? There's 51 cars! Underground 2 had 20 less, and it's ten more than Most Wanted (2012). Song Forgot to add a blog post footer song. Category:Blog posts